Elderly people are at high risk for conditions associated with inactivity, and lack
of motivation is an important factor contributing to this inactivity. It is believed that a dog
can provide the necessary motivation to get a senior citizen up and moving because it
needs attention as well as someone to feed it and take it for walks. The objective of this
five-week prospective cohort study was to determine if registered therapy dogs made
available for informal visits to a cohort of retirement community elderly would motivate
the subjects to increase their activity levels by comparing the number of steps taken in the
presence of the exposure (opportunity to visit with dog) versus steps taken when
unexposed (no opportunity to visit with dog). A secondary objective was to measure
possible improvements in mental and physical health scores over the course of the study.
The steps were measured each week with a pedometer and the happiness and depression
scores were obtained through a questionnaire given at the beginning and at the end of the
study. Twenty subjects agreed to participate, and there was an increasing trend in the
number of steps over calendar weeks, but not an increase with exposure level (number of
dog-visits). Happiness (p = .53) and depression (p = .083) scores did not significantly
change during the study. Increased step counts each week may have been associated with other motivating factors such as competition among residents and individual desire to
achieve higher counts each week.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/4403 |
| Date | 30 October 2006 |
| Creators | Tietjen, Holli Marie |
| Contributors | Fosgate, Geoffrey |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | 221313 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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